Looking For A Job

I've no idea how I'm going to handle full time work, but as there is no way short of a miracle that I will pass another WCA, I have little choice. I'm not even sure of the point of attending and, given that I don't have three forms of ID (as required), I doubt I'll even get in the building. The receptionist at the place is a stone faced haridan who has a habit of deliberately making people wait - all part of the test no doubt.

Consequently - and for a long time now - I have been searching on the still-appalling Universal Jobmatch website. This site is so broken and so poorly designed as to be completely useless. In fact it's beyond useless to the point of actually being counter productive.

Nothing is stored correctly, adverts are mislabelled and misrepresented, out of date and in some cases, don't even provide the means to actually progress forward. I would have used the word apply, but since clicking the link takes you further down the rabbit hole of online recruitment website links, one after another, it would be erroneous to do so.

The overwhelming majority of adverts pertain to telesales in one form or another, often mislabelled as 'customer service' or even 'sales assistant'. So jobs that should be retail, which is the most likely gig I'm going to get, are never actually shop work. All of these jobs require someone that is committed to being a profit hungry sales jockey. That is most assuredly not me and there is no way on god'd green earth I can fake it. Nor should I have to, it's absurd to expect a successful labour market to be built on such mendacity.

One of the worst features of this site is that, instead of moving through the adverts as you click next page, it reshuffles the existing adverts. Consequently you just end up looking at the same adverts repeatedly. Given that most of them are the same kind of job, all mislabelled, it's like a terrible hall of mirrors where nothing is real. Since none of these agencies ever bother to respond to emails the whole thing, really, is a massive waste of time.

Of course the government won't give up this system any time soon. The contract may be up for renewal soon, but the site requires more than a change in ownership, it needs scrapping and a complete overhaul. It is utterly broken at the most fundamental level and functionally useless.

This just leaves dealing with jobs advertised in real space. Unfortunately this is no better. I saw that WHSmiths (do they still exist?) wanted part time staff (everything is part time). But the application requirements called for a five year checkable work history - for a job selling magazines and Top Gear dvd's! Hardly Fort Knox! Waterstones too had a couple of adverts; you might think they'd be a good place to work, but no. The first was for a 'bookseller barista'. Their shop now, inexplicably (though probably due to the exorbitant price of books these days), has a cafe and as such they need someone to man the espresso machine while on hand multitasking flogging paperbacks. Unfortunately, the barista required someone with coffee shop experience. Such is the nature of the job that it requires an exotic moniker to make it sound more exciting than the reality of making tea and serving it to yuppies at silly prices.

Annoyingly they also listed a vacancy that turned out instead to be a CV gathering exercise. I asked about the position (my CV is useless and I don't carry a copy around with me since there's no point). But they said that not only did they not actually have any vacancies at present, but they had lots of CV's on file anyway. What is the fucking point of that? Why even bother? I complained on social media, which of course is the equivalent of pissing into the wind. What can you do? Had I made a fuss in the shop it would have had the opposite effect.

The reality is that jobs like this, shops and business in the city, will get their staff from the local student population. I've no doubt they have similar adverts regularly placed in student unions and that loads of kids, who make ideal part time staff (the least likely to complain about shit terms and conditions as well), will give their CV's in. You can see this in the make up of the staff in these places. Someone like me doesn't stand a chance.

Top Down Reform of the NHS In Action

No top down reform, that's what the liars in the Tory party said before the collective herd of ignorant ill informed morons that voted for them managed to enable a coalition. 

Five years later, and a change in the face at the Department of Health, and it's another set of treacherous promises, all designed to obfuscate the truth. This time it's all about a seven day NHS. This against a backdrop of, amongst many things, increased difficulty getting a routine GP appointment.

So the privatisation of the NHS is going well.

I've just been to my local surgery, in person, to try and book an appointment. Ordinarily this is difficult enough, thanks to the Coalition's decision to turn PCT's into private enterprises and give a bunch of local autocrats the power to do as they please. My surgery has, apparently for a month now, only been open in the morning. Staffing issues is the reason, despite their being enough staff every time I have visited prior. We have always had a surgery here, for as long as I can remember.

The real reason for this, I suspect, is that the programme manager, along with a number of the senior doctors, are more interested in their private business, 'Work Doctors'. They are supposed to be working for the NHS, for the community, as is the local surgery. However ever since our local surgery lost it's two long standing doctors to retirement, they have struggled. Merging with a neighbouring practice, against a backdrop of Coalition changes, has created a piss poor provision run by these people. Appointments with my GP are impossible at the best of times with waiting times running into hours. Now it is impossible to be seen here except in the mornings. What makes this worse is that I have to compete (yay capitalism!) with those patients from the neighbouring cohorts who also want to be seen. 

This is disgusting. This morning I received notification that I have a Work Capability Assessment on the 7th of June. This is not something I have been looking forward to. My attempts to get a diagnosis for any of the issues that I face have comprehensively failed. My last appointment with the aforementioned GP got nowhere, as usual. In fact, the evidence I presented to support my case for a successful Aspergers diagnosis, have disappeared into an administrative black hole (ie, they lost the paperwork I gave them, which will not be easily replaced in a hurry). It's a farce at this point and it's long since past the point where I feel they stopped taking me seriously. 

My attempts to address the metabolic problem - whatever the fuck it is - that has plagued me for over a decade have similarity met with no success. All of these are, IMO, valid issues to raise at a WCA, but without supporting evidence (never mind an actual diagnosis of some kind), there is little point in me attending. Not only that but to even be allowed to proceed with the assessment three forms of ID are required in lieu of a passport (i don't own one, nor am I legally olibagated to). I don't think I have anything beyond a tatty (at this point) birth certificate and a bank statement - and I sure as shit don't want them having access to what's on there. You can't trust these filth with anything.

So there it is. That's the state of support for people like me. As ever I stress there are plenty of people far worse off than I, though I shouldn't need to mention that since I am not against the divide and rule tactics that the ruling elite employ. Everyone who needs support should get support. At the moment there is nothing. In fact even the appalling Universal Jobmatch has proved to be not just a haven for shitty/funny adverts, but is so dysfunctional as to be completely useless. 

There is, quite simply, no future.